I definitely think that coffee is an acquired taste, and like so many, is something one comes to more in adulthood.
I despised coffee when I first started drinking it but I needed something to wake me up, fast, in the early days of being employed after college. I am not now, and never have been, "a morning person." When I first started drinking coffee it was akin to mainlining cocaine, and took me from virtually catatonic to awake in no time. Alas, and like all drugs (caffeine, in this case) one builds up a tolerance.
I can drink coffee now right up to before going to bed and it doesn't prevent me from sleeping. But I also have developed a real taste for it, which is why I stopped even buying ground coffee years ago, as I can't go through even a small can quite fast enough before it has oxidized (and turned) too much. Whole bean, freshly ground each morning, and freshly brewed. Yet, I don't consider myself a coffee snob, as some (if not most) of the "coffee snob coffees" are way overroasted for my taste. Starbucks, even their "blonde" roast, all just tastes burnt.
And there has got to be some really weird alchemy to coffee roasting that isn't strictly based on color. Italian roast, in Italy, is every bit as pitch black as the stuff you can get here in the USA, but has zero of the "burnt to cinders" flavor profile that US-roasted Italian roast has. The same is true of French roast, which is just a bit lighter, when you get it in France. The only French roast I ever bought in the USA that tasted like French roast in France was Eight O' Clock French Roast, of all things, and it's disappeared from the shelves where I live.
